How Is a Relationship with God Possible?

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edarlitrix

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If, as Catholicism teaches, God is timeless and unchanging, then how can we have a relationship with Him (e.g., through prayer)? It is as though He is detached from us and is never actually “there” in our present. Can He even respond to us since He is immutable? Or is that a misunderstanding of immutability?

It just seems like a God who “desires us” and is always “seeking after us” and “speaking to us” in a still, small voice and listening to our prayers and guiding us through life is a God who is IN TIME, in OUR MOMENT. It doesn’t seem to square with the Catholic definition of God.
 
Romans 11.33-36, *"Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

“For who has known the mind of the Lord,
or who has been his counselor?”
“Or who has given a gift to him
that he might be repaid?”
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen".*
 
Because the Catholic understanding of God is that in the fullness of time, God became man, Incarnate in the created humanity of Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, born of the Virgin Mary. He walked among us, experienced all of human existence the way we do–except for sin–and then suffered death, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven. If we follow after him, uniting ourselves to his life and suffering and death, then we too will gain the promised Resurrection. God created all things, including our humanity, and thus made them good, and because of this, we can get back to God from whom we came through this creation–and the Incarnation is how. Hence we hear that Christ is the mediator with the Father–since he is fully God and fully man, he is able to intercede with us before the throne of the Father.

-ACEGC
 
edarlitrix said:
If, as Catholicism teaches, God is timeless and unchanging, then how can we have a relationship with Him (e.g., through prayer)? It is as though He is detached from us and is never actually “there” in our present. Can He even respond to us since He is immutable? Or is that a misunderstanding of immutability?

It just seems like a God who “desires us” and is always “seeking after us” and “speaking to us” in a still, small voice and listening to our prayers and guiding us through life is a God who is IN TIME, in OUR MOMENT. It doesn’t seem to square with the Catholic definition of God.
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How can humans have relationships with animals and even plants? We are different species but LOVE is a powerful force that transcends time and space or the lack of them. The notion of a personal G-d means that He is able to communicate lovingly with us even though we are His creatures and not His co-equal in any respect. After all, G-d created us in His image and likeness, as well as creating time, space, nature, and our ability to perceive these features of the universe.
 
=edarlitrix;11296925]If, as Catholicism teaches, God is timeless and unchanging, then how can we have a relationship with Him (e.g., through prayer)? It is as though He is detached from us and is never actually “there” in our present. Can He even respond to us since He is immutable? Or is that a misunderstanding of immutability?
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It just seems like a God who “desires us” and is always “seeking after us” and “speaking to us” in a still, small voice and listening to our prayers and guiding us through life is a God who is IN TIME, in OUR MOMENT. It doesn’t seem to square with the Catholic definition of God.
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We EXIST
  1. because God choose to Create us [Gen. 1:26-27]
  2. God Choose to Create us for a precise and single reason
    Isaiah 43: 7 & 21
“And every one that calleth upon my name, I** have created him for my glory**, I have formed him, and made him & This people have I formed for myself, they shall shew forth my praise”
  1. Because God IS Perfect He desires “perfect love” retruned for tthe Perfect LOVE He gives to us
  2. This is ONLY possible through GRACE 1. offered to us by God 2. accepted and rightly applied by us 3. BUT can be denined and rejected. Faith [singular in truth and application] is too a GIFT from God to thise whi seek Him.
Our relationship is “perfected” through His Catholic Church and the Sacraments She offers in His name for this very reason and goals POSSIBLE attainment.👍
 
A ‘relationship’ with God can be understood at different levels. A lot of quasi-Protestant Catholics talk about “a personal relationship with God.” But that, in my opinion, is often simply a relationship with an anthropmorphic paternal archetype.

The best ‘relationship’ we can have with God is achieved by His total transcendence and otherness, the dweller of inaccessible light. Whatever image arises, what ever ‘sense’ of God’s ‘plan’, etc. dismiss as a mere children’s idol. What we can see, what we can think of, is never God. And even this understanding of God as being beyond knowledge must be dismissed.

I recommend Nicholas of Cusa’s “On Learned Ignorance”, or “The Cloud of Unknowing”. The way to form a relationship with God is this: transcend, literally, EVERYTHING.
 
If we believe Scripture, God made us in his image and likeness. This must have been so that he could speak to us and we could speak back.
 
Being inside time, we have one set of mental states to correspond to each moment in time. Since, however, God is outside of time, he has one mindset to correspond to each event in time.
 
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